Running the official (and derived) clients - The official 3.2.1 (source tarball) and the experimental (source tarball) clients should both work fine under any Unix flavor that has Python support. If you wish to use the GUI version, you will also need wxPython.

For Debian systems there is a package called bittorrent, which requires the python 2.2 package. You should also install the packages libwxgtk2.4-python and mime-support, if you plan to use the GUI version of the client.

If you are using Mandrake with Cooker, you might want to try the RPMs listed here.

Below are some general instructions for installing on a Unix/Linux system.

Install Python, preferably version 2.2. You can run "python -V" to see what version you currently have installed, if any. Also, you may have multiple versions of Python installed, so you might check /usr/bin for commands like python2.2 if plain python says it's version 1.x. If your distribution uses packages, use the search tool to find prepackaged versions before trying to manually install. Try here and here for Python RPMs.

Install wxPython if you want to use the GUI version. Note that this will require the GLib and GTK+ libraries, which are probably already on your system if you have GNOME installed. (Start here or search your distribution's package manager if you need GTK+.) You'll want to find the wxPython package corresponding to the version of Python which you have installed. For RPM systems such as RedHat and Mandrake, you might try the following wxPython RPMs corresponding to version 2.1, version 2.2, and version 2.3 of Python. More RPMs are available at the Sourceforge site, and you can also consult the wxPython download page. Please be aware that the RPMs linked above assume that Python is installed under /usr and that the Python libs are in /usr/lib/python2.x/. If this is not the case, you will probably need to tell the installer this information.

Finally, install the source tarball for the BT client to a directory of your choice. To integrate the client with your web browser, it will be necessary to associate files of type "application/x-bittorrent" with the BitTorrent client. You will need to add a line such as the following to your /etc/mailcap file:

application/x-bittorrent; /usr/local/bin/btdownloadgui.py --responsefile %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"

Note that you should substitute the correct path for the location in which you installed the source tarball. If don't have wxPython or would prefer to use one of the text-mode clients you can replace btdownloadgui.py with btdownloadcurses.py or btdownloadheadless.py. Also note there's an error in the INSTALL.unix.txt file, which is missing the --responsefile argument.

Additionally, with Linux/Unix you should also be able to use any of the alternative clients that are cross-platform, such as PTC or Azureus, or any of the other Java clients listed below.